The starkly beautiful seventh album from the venerable singer-songwriter reveals more of her aged wisdom through winding narratives rich with humor and despair.
There is a song on Laura Marling’s new album which bottles despair and keeps it airtight, like a storm cloud in a glass dome. “Fortune” is the kind of musical moment that can make you freeze in the deli aisle, rooted to the spot by Marling’s voice. It’s a spare lament about an unnamed woman who hopes to escape her unhappy life yet is powerless to make that change. The burden of sorrow is passed down from mother to child until, finally, the “unbearable pain” is absorbed by Marling herself, whose inspiration for the song was her mother’s never-used “running away fund.” Picture-perfect appearances, she seems to say, can hide a well of sadness deeper than we can imagine.
On her Grammy-nominated 2017 album Semper Femina, Marling used Classical-era imagery to add mythos to women-focused stories, but Song for Our Daughter, her seventh album, is guided by its own kind of far-reaching lore. Marling does away with her previous record’s occasional blues-rock grit and peels her sound back to its gleaming bones: pristine acoustic guitar, textural hums, a metronome click. She doesn’t need much else to frame her quartz pendant of a voice, which can reach Alpine altitudes as well recall a troubadour singing through chewing tobacco. Marling has described Song for Our Daughter as a rumination on modern femininity, and her tendency to leave lyrical narratives open and unfinished adds an evocative elasticity to her new music. You may find yourself wanting to fill in the spaces as if playing a particularly soul-searching kind of Mad Libs.
Marling—an avid reader who once visited her local book store several times a week—sketches her new heroines with a literary bent. The subject of the rousing album opener, “Alexandra,” is partially inspired by a Leonard Cohen song, an enigmatic woman who finds ”diamonds in the drain” and collects them with abandon. The metaphor implies the jewels are simple men that fall under Alexandra’s spell. “If she loved you like a woman,” Marling sings with a withering tone, “Did you feel like a man?” At other times, Marling is downright funny, rolling her eyes at the champagne socialism of the recently woke. “Girl, please,” she sings drily. “Don’t bullshit me.” Still, Marling has not quite forgotten her genteel upbringing in Berkshire, UK. “I won’t write a woman with a man on my mind,” she sings on the album, before worrying, “Hope that doesn’t sound too unkind.”
At other times, Marling sounds delightfully carefree. She sings the upbeat, folk-rock tune “Strange Girl” with a swaggering tone and a full band, calling to mind a group of journeymen busking with a bashed-up guitar case open at their feet. At one point in the song, a laugh creeps into her voice, as if she’d caught the eye of a mugging band member mid-sentence. And while “Held Down” describes the cruelty of abandonment over trundling bass guitar, Marling sounds about as stressed as a flower child singing to the moon, her vocals bathed in psychedelic coos. As much as she sings of unrest, Marling's tone suggests a serene clairvoyance for the future, as if she has an 8-ball telling her everything will be okay. She’s even able to bring an optimistic outlook to the starkly beautiful break-up song “The End of the Affair,” a co-write with Blake Mills. “I love you goodbye,” she sings, her voice rising to a falsetto before putting a decisive cap on the relationship. “Now let me live my life.”
Song for Our Daughter brims with peaceful reflections that, even though Marling herself is just grazing her 30s, could seem like the work of an artist in their twilight years. “I’ve lived my life in fits and spurts,” she sings at one point on the album; “Bruises all end up benign,” she offers elsewhere. She thinks about passing on that perspective to an imagined daughter in the elegant, bucolic title track, describing misogynist “bullshit” and predatory creeps. “You’ll cut your way through it somehow,” she sings with relief, a tone that suggests lessons learned the hard way. Marling caps the song by broadening its perspective further still, invoking the writers of “words that will outlive the dead.” It’s a class to which Marling also belongs.
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